‘Ditty Diego’: the bizarre 1968 song written by Jack Nicholson
He might now bear the leathery face of an indisputable Hollywood icon, but during his younger years, Jack Nicholson was bordering on being a countercultural icon.
Living the archetypal rock and roll lifestyle he presented with such cool in Easy Rider, Nicholson could have had another life as a songwriter, were it not for his acting career taking off.
In the days before The Beatles ruined everything with the outlandish suggestion that artists could write their own material, you could make a decent living writing songs for record labels. Lou Reed, for instance, spent his pre-Velvet Underground days penning pop songs for the long-forgotten Pickwick Records. While Nicholson always seemed to have his heart set on the realm of acting, his film work bore some often forgotten connections to that songwriting role.
Inevitably, the breadth of Nicholson’s filmography means that the actor has had to sing onscreen on a multitude of occasions, whether it was McMurphy’s rendition of ‘The Star-spangled Banner’ in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or his take on The Who’s ‘Go To The Mirror’ from the rock opera Tommy in 1975. Neither of those tracks, however, earned Nicholson a songwriting credit, regardless of how his incredible acting performances added to those songs.
Nicholson did, however, earn a writing credit on an impressively obscure side by The Monkees. Fresh-faced bubblegum pop likely isn’t the kind of sound that springs to mind when conjuring up images of Jack Nicholson, but that was the mainstay of The Monkees’ existence. Manufactured by some television producers in an attempt to capitalise on the success of bands like The Beatles, the group were about as far away from the ethos of the counterculture era as it was possible to be. They were, though, at least self-aware.
That self-awareness spurred one of the stranger musicals of the 1960s, in the form of 1968’s Head, a satirical musical starring the Monkees and written by Jack Nicholson alongside Bob Rafelson.
Seeing the fictional band move through a series of fever-dream vignettes, including a war movie and a western, Head is an often (and understandably) forgotten aspect of The Monkees’ reign. It did, however, earn Nicholson a songwriting credit for ‘Ditty Diego – War Chant’, from the film’s soundtrack.
A 50-second rhyme that could easily soundtrack a nightmarish acid trip, the song is a self-aware satire of The Monkees’ mere existence, citing their “manufactured image with no philosophies”. It isn’t a stellar songwriting effort, even by the standards of The Monkees’ discography, and it demonstrates exactly why Nicholson chose the path of acting rather than songwriting. Nevertheless, the song still marks a strange and inventive period in the actor’s existence.
He was, after all, already an established face of the silver screen by 1968, but he had yet to exercise his potential as a masterful leading man or the face of a bold new generation. That image wouldn’t arrive until the following year, when he starred in the legendary Easy Rider, which unsurprisingly outshone Head by some margin.
Other songs have attached themselves to the actor’s career at varying points, but ‘Ditty Diego’ is the only one that he can claim a songwriting credit on, reaffirming his position as a cultural icon of the 1960s and hinting at a lost career as a songwriter.
